My tween daughter invited a friend to spend the day, and as the 7 hours loomed ominously unfilled ahead of us, I wondered: What the heck should we do?
First, I decided to do something for me: I had a 20% coupon to Kennebooks in Kennebunk so that was our first stop. A quick check of the local paper told me that they were having an Open House that started at 10:30am, so it was just me and my tween for this. When we arrived, there was a kids “author event” so we headed down for that, but it turned out to be for littler kids, so we did some browsing for an hour. I bought a book for a friend for Christmas.
Sigh. I love to be with the books. But I digress…
Next, we picked up the friend and headed for the library. They browsed the shelves, and checked out some books, and then harassed me until I gave up and said, “Okay, yes! I’m ready to leave too!”. While we were there, we found a new cookbook called Betty Crocker’s Just the two of us, and they spied a recipe while flipping through it that they wanted to make. Since we had all of the ingredients already, I agreed.
Lunch was next, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I took the easy way out: McDonald’s was right nearby, and since it was almost 1pm and they were “starving”, we headed there next. In my defense, we haven’t eaten McD’s food in months, so here’s hoping that it didn’t do us too much damage. We drove through and brought it home to eat it (their choice).
Then we made the Double Chocolate Snack Cake.
They did a great job! I helped a little but they were really in charge of the recipe (I was in charge of the oven) and it turned out really great. We ate most of it fairly quickly.
After that, they hula hooped and played on the swing in the yard, fed bread to the chickens, and played a few hands of cards: Uno, War.
Then, they actually read the books that they checked out of the library for a little while.
I had to run to Hannaford’s and they were thrilled to come with me. They got free cookies at the bakery, and free samples of cheese and turkey at the deli. They even watched the cart full of groceries after I realized that the most important thing that I went there to buy, I had forgotten, so I had to go back and get it and run through the cashier’s line again. (Hey, at least I remembered before I got back home; I figured that I was ahead of the game!)
When we got back, I made them spaghetti for supper, and after we finished eating they had another little bit of time to play.
They watched a little TV: one episode of iCarly, and one episode of Drake and Josh. Then they played some songs on the electric keyboard for a while.
When it was time for her friend to go home, they had even picked up after themselves!
It was a great day; I even was able to get my 2,000 words written in between everything else. Life is good!
Karen Creamer Author, Coach, Speaker 